Some grest laughs at the PR but it was loooooooong. Was in a flight with 50% newer players a couple who had never drafted before. Only 3 knew anything about the set and we were translating almost card for card. Pack one took a full hour to draft.

And so I obv. drafted horribly and got crushed 0-3. Fun fact: I resolved half-kitten/half-kitten 3 times and won all 3 games.

I just lost all the other ones. They weren't even close.

Best moments were grabbing ranfom non-magic patrons passing by to ask if they liked squirrels or to choose a card please. The compliment-knight had to be announced aloud standing on your chair & voted on by the crowd. Good format. Well built. I'm just salty I played so badly.

I finally got to draft this set and I loved it! I built an awesome Rakdos aggro contraption deck which ran like clockwork. Best moments was swinging with two hoisted hirelings and 3 homunculus from handy dandy clone machine, I needed some help. Also got up to 7/8 contraptions in play the 1 drop red contraption maker was easily MVP.

I picked up a Phoebe in my box so I'm going to put that together and see how it goes. I hope my LGS will allow silver commander to continue after the celebration period.

Half-orc half-beaver wielding a Sword of Dungeon's and Dragons stomped all over the place. Got Urza but never got to cast it.

Host/Augment was the hit mechanic of the night. Contraptions were tried but never super successful.

Pulled everything I wanted except for the Baron and Griselda, and the Dr. Still have some packs to go.

Yep, I thought that Augment wouldn't be as good as it was and contraptions would have been better than they were but I wonder how much of that was first draft and everyone doing a bit of both. Both mechanics are strange in that they both need pairs of cards to be drafted (the host and augment cards or the contraption and the assemble cards). I wonder how drafts would look when you have players dedicated to spamming these strategies and whether it's even viable to do it.

I think that it's really had to evaluate when in the pack to draft contraptions because they are so parasitic on cards that assemble them. Do you go for the good rigger cards first and have second-choice contraptions or cut contraptions and get second-choice rigger cards?

It turns out, Unstable has an infinite engine. When you have a Half-Squirrel, Half-Pony and cast any creature with an enter the battlefield effect, which all Hosts do, you are allowed to cast that creature and get that effect as many times as you want.

Ordinary Pony is a common and Half-Squirrel, Half- is an uncommon and the set has numerous was to tutor for each, so the ability for the combo to come up in limited is pretty high.

The point of Unstable is to lean towards the fun side of the spectrum and this combination while fun the first time would soon be very un-fun, so we decided to do something about it.

Black border Magic tries to avoid power level errata, but silver border tends to break black border rules, so what we did was errata Ordinary Pony to do all the fun stuff it normally does and just disallow the infinite combo.

Ordinary Pony’s Oracle text now reads:

When this creature enters the battlefield, you may exile target non-Horse creature you control that wasn’t put onto the battlefield with this ability this turn, then return it to the battlefield under its owner’s control.

You can now bounce any creature with one name once a turn, but not more than once.

Yeah, so, I’ve assembled an Unstable Cube* and we drafted it**, having lots of fun***.

Until Ol’ Buzzbark hits play. He is by far the best card in the draft. I’m running a Goblin Explosioneers, heavy construct deck. He’s either removal or boost or both and he’s vastly under-costed. Today, on turn 5, I played him in for 3 dice and ended up with an additional 14 power (4/5/2 on the dice) on the table over 3 creatures for 5 mana. The previous game I hit a one sided wrath against my opponent for the same cost. In 4 rounds, he’s been opponent’s bad beat story in every round. Crazy good! You just shove your board up next to your opponent’s board and off you go. *** So, I am having lots of fun!

*It was actually really annoying to get the mix right. I initially went with 1M/1R/2U/4C but that was just huge. So I cut it down to 2x each C/U, 1x each R/M, one of each different copy of the various multiples & 3x each Killbot to enable the Mary O’Kill deck and allow players to draft 2-drop filler without colour requirements. This seems to be a good mix, maybe a little more rare heavy than a normal booster draft but that’s the joy of Cube.

**As only 2 of the 6 had ever played Unstable before, we went with generous boosters of x15 non-contraptions that allowed players to really get a theme going, even if they shared it with other drafters. Then the Contraptions were split into 4 random piles, one was put back in the box and the other 3 were randomized and distributed to each table between each round. This allowed for players to ignore the horrible “Do I draft the contraption or the contraption enabler?” question while drafting, but gave them totally random contraptions if they did go that route. Apart from lucky pulls by the small contraption drafting players, it benefitted the drafters who went all-in on contraptions as the volume of contraptions they revealed tended to negate bad pulls. Randomising and redistributing the piles between rounds smoothed out the very strong piles between the 3 matches. Essentially you weren’t being hit by the same 4-5 OP contraptions again and again.